Writing prompts · Fantasy
Fantasy Writing Prompts
The strongest fantasy premise makes the impossible feel consequential. These prompts start with a rule, a cost, or a piece of history that someone benefits from hiding.
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How to shape a strong fantasy premise
Price the magic before you use it
Write down the rule behind the wonder and the person who pays for it. Consistent cost makes magic feel like part of the world rather than an escape hatch, and it turns every spell into a decision instead of a solution.
Let the worldbuilding create the dilemma
A fantasy premise earns its setting when the invented rule is the reason the character cannot act freely. If the same story would work with the magic removed, the magic is decoration rather than structure.
Give the old order a reasonable case
Inherited systems — guilds, oaths, monarchies, orders — hold power because they solved something once. Let the institution be genuinely useful to someone, so dismantling it costs the protagonist more than courage.
Decide what the wonder is hiding
Most fantasy premises improve when the spectacle conceals an ordinary human arrangement: a debt, a lie, an inheritance, a grief. Name that arrangement early, even if the reader will not reach it for chapters.
40 original fantasy prompts
Use one as written, combine two, or take only the pressure point that catches your attention.
- 1
Every spell removes one memory from the caster. A court magician realises the queen remembers a war that everyone else has forgotten.
- 2
A village pays its dragon in secrets, not gold. This year, the dragon asks for the one secret that keeps the village together.
- 3
The heir to a conquered kingdom can speak to its ruined cities, but each city tells a different version of the surrender.
- 4
A mapmaker discovers that drawing a border creates it in the real world—and two armies are waiting for the ink to dry.
- 5
Magic in this kingdom runs on inherited debt. A foundling discovers she is the only person alive who owes nothing, and three houses want to buy her signature.
- 6
The god of the harvest has been answering prayers for a decade. The priest who has been writing the replies is running out of ways to fake a miracle.
- 7
A blacksmith can forge any weapon if she names the person it will eventually kill. Today a stranger commissions a blade and refuses to give a name.
- 8
Every hundred years the forest moves one mile west. The village that has followed it for six centuries reaches a coastline the forest intends to cross.
- 9
A translator for the fae court realises both delegations have been relying on her to soften terms neither would have accepted, and the treaty is due at dawn.
- 10
The last dragon is dying of old age, peacefully, and four kingdoms who built their legitimacy on the promise of slaying it are racing to reach the body first.
- 11
A young oracle only ever sees the second-worst outcome. She has learned to work backwards from it, until a vision arrives showing nothing at all.
- 12
Two siblings inherit a spellbook whose pages rewrite themselves to suit whoever read it last. Neither can prove what the original said.
- 13
The kingdom's wards are powered by the honest grief of its citizens. After a decade of peace, the walls are failing for the best possible reason.
- 14
A knight sworn to protect a bloodline discovers the family died out generations ago and the oath transferred to whoever currently occupies the house.
- 15
In a city where debts are paid in years of life, a moneylender realises she has accumulated four hundred years and no reason to spend them.
- 16
A cartographer's guild suppresses maps of one valley. The apprentice sent to burn the last copy finds her own village drawn inside it.
- 17
Every child in the province is born knowing one true sentence. This year, forty children are born knowing the same one.
- 18
A witch who trades in stolen names is hired to steal her own, by a client who cannot explain why.
- 19
The mountain that eats armies has begun politely declining them. Two generals must find another way to end a war that has no other ending.
- 20
A librarian tasked with cataloguing prophecies notices the collection is arranged in the order they will come true, and she is only halfway through the shelf.
- 21
The empire's magic requires a willing sacrifice each generation. This generation's volunteer has read the records and knows willingness was never the requirement.
- 22
A river spirit agrees to spare the town if someone tells it a story it has not heard. The town's last storyteller died the previous winter.
- 23
Two rival wizards discover their familiars have been carrying messages between them for years, and the correspondence is more honest than either has ever been.
- 24
A miner strikes a vein of ore that remembers being a person. The guild wants the ore; the person wants a hearing.
- 25
The queen's champion cannot be defeated while the queen believes in him. She is beginning to have doubts and does not know why they matter.
- 26
A woman inherits a house that adds a room each time she forgives someone. She has been avoiding the west wing for years.
- 27
Every map of the northern road leads travellers to a different destination, all of which exist. A courier must deliver to the one that does not appear on any map.
- 28
The city's founding treaty was signed by a creature nobody can now describe. Three witnesses give three incompatible accounts, and all three are under oath.
- 29
A healer who can transfer injuries realises she has been quietly accumulating a wound nobody gave her.
- 30
The order that guards the gate has forgotten what is on the other side. The newest recruit is the first in a century to ask before swearing.
- 31
A thief steals a crown that turns out to be a sentence: whoever wears it must rule until someone else volunteers.
- 32
Ghosts in this country are simply people whose paperwork was never completed. A clerk discovers a backlog of four thousand cases.
- 33
A shepherd's flock returns each night with one more sheep than left. He has stopped counting; his daughter has not.
- 34
The war ended when both sides agreed to forget the reason. A historian finds the reason, written in her grandmother's hand, and must decide whether peace survives knowing.
- 35
A boy raised by a giant learns the giant has been shrinking, deliberately, in order to stay in his life.
- 36
Two kingdoms share a single sun that rises for one and sets for the other. The astronomer who discovers it can be redirected serves neither.
- 37
A bell that has not rung in three hundred years rings once. Nobody in the city admits to hearing it except a deaf girl who felt it.
- 38
The forest gives back everything taken from it, eventually, and slightly wrong. A woodcutter's family has been receiving returns for four generations.
- 39
An apprentice discovers her master's greatest working was a spell of ordinary competence cast on herself, and it is wearing off.
- 40
A kingdom's laws are enforced by a creature that eats liars. It has grown thin, and the council cannot agree whether that is progress.
Other full prompt collections
Each of these carries 40+ original prompts and its own craft notes.
- Romance writing prompts
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- Mystery writing prompts
- Thriller writing prompts
- Young Adult writing prompts
- Fanfiction writing prompts
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Frequently asked questions
What makes a good fantasy writing prompt?
A good fantasy prompt supplies a rule about how the world works, a character positioned badly against that rule, and no obvious way to satisfy both. It should not decide the ending — if the prompt already implies the resolution, it is a synopsis rather than a starting point.
How do I keep my magic system from feeling arbitrary?
Fix the cost before you fix the capability. Readers accept almost any power as long as its price is consistent and visible, and they lose trust the moment a spell becomes cheaper because the plot needs it to be. Writing the cost down is usually enough.
Do I need a whole world built before I start a fantasy story?
No. Build outward from the pressure in the prompt: the one rule it depends on, the people that rule advantages, and the people it does not. Most published fantasy worlds were assembled around a story rather than before one.
Can I use these fantasy prompts in a published book?
Yes. Use, change, combine, or discard any prompt here, and publish the result commercially or otherwise. No credit is required, though the prompts are written to be starting points rather than plots, so most of the work will be yours regardless.
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